Magazine editors worry about topicality. Stories they send to press on Monday may be out of date by the time the magazine appears on Wednesday or Friday. It is no consolation to know that similar doubts affect the editors of daily newspapers, fated to follow in the wake of television. The print media must play to their strengths. Even a weekly magazine cannot stay on top of a breaking story of national significance. By the time it has appeared, things will have moved on and its readers will have seen more recent material online, on television and radio, or in their daily newspapers.

The internet, however, levels the playing field. TV, radio and newspapers all increasingly begin their reporting online. This is called a ‘Web first’ strategy and has its advantages and disadvantages. Clearly the major advantage is ‘owning’ the story. If you are the first to report it online then you are likely to dominate the search engine results when people look for that story. This in turn is likely to drive readers – and potential subscribers – to your main product (whether that is print or online).

The major fear that publishers have with ‘Web first’ strategies is losing their exclusives to rivals. This, however, is to misunderstand the complexities of multi-platform publishing which should involve playing to the strengths of each medium you publish in. Some publishers, for example, will supply video interviews to broadcasters (and online) just ahead of the publication of the print version of their story. This helps attract interest from people who might not normally buy your publication, without ‘giving away’ the print version of the story itself.

A good example of how not to do this comes from Rolling Stone magazine’s profile of top US commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The general was quoted making negative remarks about the vice president and key members of the US cabinet and the publication of these remarks in print led to his dismissal.

“Rolling Stone didn’t even bother putting [the story] online before they rolled it out [in print]. In fact, despite the fact that everyone else’s website led the profile, Rolling Stone’s site led with Lady Gaga … all day and didn’t even put the story online until 11:00.”

“The story made its way across the web anyway. Politico posted a PDF of the story and the Associated Press ran a thorough summary. Rolling Stone didn’t get much in the way of traffic out of it … After the piece ran [on Rolling Stone’s website], it started picking up incoming links, presumably driving tremendous traffic to the site. I checked in on the story today, exactly 24 hours later, to find that, despite the story completely dominating the news cycle — TV, blogosphere, Twitter, newspapers — only 16 comments had been posted to the story.

“Why? Of course the late posting was a factor. National security reporter Spencer Ackerman’s first [blog] post on the general’s apology, which went up several hours before Rolling Stone published, attracted 47 comments on his personal blog. Politico’s defense reporter Laura Rozen’s blog post on the AP’s summary of the story, which went up at 10:46 p.m. the night before the story appeared, has about twice as many comments as the Rolling Stone story itself. Twitter was buzzing with comments all day. There was nowhere to discuss at Rolling Stone, so the conversation naturally happened elsewhere.”

Another approach is to play to the community-based strengths of online publishing, by seeding an online debate with the main points of your exclusive, and using the best parts of that online discussion to flesh out the publication in print of your full exclusive.

In other words, do not fall into the trap of overvaluing the ‘exclusive’ at the expense of actual readers. If your objective is to attract the largest number of readers – online and in print – then be strategic in how you publish different parts of your story across different platforms. Can you involve online users at an early stage? Can you produce video or audio that bloggers and broadcasters might want to distribute? How can you give it the richest treatment in print that could not be duplicated in a broadcast or web treatment? And, once published, how can you ensure that discussion of the exclusive takes place on – or directs traffic to – your site (or indeed, where your revenue is coming from, which may include adverts embedded in media on other sites)? All of these elements require thought at the outset of any newsgathering operation.

A magazine has its own strengths it should play to. Instead of trailing behind newspapers and television – whose space and time is more limited, and news cycle more tempestuous – it can provide analytical coverage, based on its trusted relationships within the industry and in-house expertise. It can also focus its treatment more specifically than the mass media will – as a newspaper with a broader audience will not be able to assume much prior knowledge on their part.

Some editors, usually of weekly magazines, take the view that monthlies shouldn’t try to compete in the news area. They should simply use the space for something else. This is defeatist, and overlooks the role of the website in providing news updates as they occur. The slower pace of a monthly should mean that it can unearth and research genuinely exclusive stories. That way it will lead everybody else, which is good for morale and sales. It can certainly go deeper, using the sources it has had time to cultivate.

If you are going to do news in a monthly, you must consider the issue of the exclusivity of your stories and whether you wish to lead with the story in print or online. Given the increasing ability of sources to publish themselves (via a company or individual blog, for example – or even Facebook), or the likelihood that someone else might do the same, obtaining cooperation and silence while you wait for the next monthly print run to roll around is becoming increasingly difficult.

Ultimately you must ask yourself where the value lies: in the exclusivity, or in the treatment and distribution of that information? Do people buy your magazine purely for the exclusive news – or largely for other content? Is it better to publish part of the exclusive online, establishing ‘ownership’ of it and promoting further revelations or analysis in print? (While also attracting new readers who come across your publication when a link is sent to them)

Publishing a part of an exclusive online – and holding the remainder back for print publication – is a strategy often adopted by publishers. Your own decision will depend in large part upon where your funding comes from, where you are trying to attract it, what sort of people read your publication, and how.

More and more publishers are going for this ‘web-first’ strategy, playing to the strengths of each medium: speed, findability and social distribution online; and analysis and depth in print. It can also increase the life of a story from a single issue to a couple of weeks online, through printing, and back online with further reaction.

Building a relationship with sources often rests on the authority of your magazine and yourself, and the serious treatment you can give to their story. They will have to balance that against the control that they will have if they publish the story themselves, online. One factor that may be worth raising is that ‘exclusivity’ often attracts more interest from those who missed the exclusive, than a source-published story which all journalists can see at the same time. The founder of Wikileaks understood this when breaking the various ‘Warlogs’ stories – instead of publishing the logs online as they had with previous leaks, the organisation partnered with individual news organisations in three different countries, attracting wider coverage of the documents not just in those newspapers but also in jealous rivals.

The bulk of your coverage will not be exclusive. Use the focusing power of news design to achieve the right balance. You can give great prominence and projection to your exclusive stories, while covering the stuff most readers may have seen in a round-up box or column of news ‘briefs’.

Aside from the news that makes the printed magazine, a monthly news team tends to produce a continuously updated news page as part of the website. This may include one or more individual, team, or subject-based blogs, and a daily or weekly e-mail update.

Your own news feeds may be syndicated to other news sites and blogs, adding to your publication’s reach. Typically a magazine website’s news section will have an RSS feed of its latest stories; increasingly, they will have a number of RSS feeds for news about different parts of their field.

RSS feeds have enormous flexibility and potential for various uses. If someone uses an RSS reader on their computer or phone, they can read your feeds there; if they publish a blog they can ‘pull’ your feed to show your latest headlines (when clicked, the user will be taken to your site). You can also use RSS feeds to cross-publish your latest headlines to a Twitter account, a Facebook page, and various other places.

RSS feeds can be full (showing the entire story) or partial (showing only a first paragraph – the user then has to click through to the full story on your site – although this introduces an extra step that can reduce readership and create a frustrating user experience), and they can include advertising and multimedia. They are, in effect, one of the delivery vans of internet distribution.

Managing information overload

A magazine editor now has little problem finding information on a range of topics. It is likely that you will have subscribed to email newsletters, RSS feeds, Facebook groups and pages, YouTube channels and various other sources of news and information both in your field and on journalistic or management topics.

There tend to be two fears driving journalists’ information consumption: the fear that you will miss out on something because you’re not following the right sources; and the fear that you’ll miss out on something because you’re following too many sources. This leads to two broad approaches: people who follow everything of any interest (‘follow, then filter’); and people who are very strict about the number of sources of information they follow (‘filter, then follow’).

A good analogy to use here is of streams versus ponds. A pond is manageable, but predictable. A stream is different every time you step in it, but you can miss things.

As an editor you are in the business of variety: you need to be exposed to a range of different pieces of information, and cannot afford to be caught out. A good strategy for managing your information feeds then, is to follow a wide variety of sources, but to add filters to ensure you don’t miss all the best stuff.

If you are using an RSS reader one way to do this is to have specific folders for your ‘must-read’ feeds. Andrew Dubber, a music industries academic and author of the New Music Strategies blog, recommends choosing 10 subjects in your area, and choosing five ‘must-read’ feeds for each, for example.

For email newsletters and other email updates you can adopt a similar strategy: must-reads go into your Inbox; others are filtered into subfolders to be read if you have time.

To create a folder in Google Reader, add a new feed (or select an existing one) and under the heading click on Feed Settings… – then scroll to the bottom and click on New Folder… – this will also add the feed to that folder.

If you are following hundreds or thousands of people on Twitter, use Twitter lists to split them into manageable channels: ‘People I know’; ‘journalism’; ‘industry’; and so on. To add someone to a list on Twitter, visit their profile page and click on the list button, which will be around the same area as the ‘Follow’ button.

You can also use websites such as Paper.li to send you a daily email ‘newspaper’ of the most popular links shared by a particular list of friends every day, so you don’t miss out on the most interesting stories.

Social bookmarking: creating an archive and publishing at the same time

Social bookmarking tools like Delicious, Digg and Diigo can also be useful in managing web-based resources that you don’t have time to read or think might come in useful later. Bookmarking them essentially ‘files’ each webpage so you can access them quickly when you need them (you do this by giving each page a series of relevant tags, e.g. ‘dieting’, ‘research’, ‘UK’, ‘Jane Jones’).

They also include a raft of other useful features, such as RSS feeds (allowing you to automatically publish selected items to a website, blog, or Twitter or Facebook account), and the ability to see who else has bookmarked the same pages (and what else they have bookmarked, which is likely to be relevant to your interests).

Check the site’s Help or FAQ pages to find out how to use them effectively. Typically this will involve adding a button to your browser’s Links bar (under the web address box) by dragging a link (called ‘Bookmark on Delicious’ or similar) from the relevant page of the site (look for ‘bookmarklets’).

Then, whenever you come across a page you want to bookmark, click on that button. A new window will appear with the name and address of the webpage, and space for you to add comments (a typical tactic is to paste a key quote from the page here), and tags.

Useful things to add as tags include anything that will help you find this later, such as any organisations, locations or people that are mentioned, the author or publisher, and what sort of information is included, such as ‘report’, ‘statistics’, ‘research’, ‘casestudy’ and so on.

If installing a button on your browser is too complicated or impractical many of these services also allow you to bookmark a page by sending the URL to a specific email address. Alternatively, you can just copy the URL and log on to the bookmarking site to bookmark it.

Some bookmarking services double up as blogging sites: Tumblr and Stumbleupon are just two. The process is the same as described above, but these services are more intuitively connected with other services such as Twitter and Facebook, so that bookmarked pages are also automatically published on those services too. With one click your research not only forms a useful archive but also becomes an act of publishing and distribution.

Every so often you might want to have a clear out: try diverting mailings and feeds to a folder for a week without looking at them. After seven days, ask which ones, if any, you have missed. You might benefit from unsubscribing and cutting down some information clutter. In general, it may be useful to have background information, but it all occupies your time. Treat such things as you would anything sent to you on paper. If you need it, and it is likely to be difficult to find again, file it or bookmark it. If not, bin it. After a while, you’ll find it gets easier.

Do you have any other techniques for dealing with information overload?

I was very excited recently to read on the Scraperwiki mailing list that the website was working on making it possible to create an RSS feed from a SQL query.

Yes, that’s the sort of thing that gets me excited these days.

But before you reach for a blunt object to knock some sense into me, allow me to explain…

Scraperwiki has, until now, done very well at trying to make it easier to get hold of hard-to-reach data. It has done this in two ways: firstly by creating an environment which lowers the technical barrier to creating scrapers (these get hold of the data); and secondly by lowering the social barrier to creating scrapers (by hosting a space where journalists can ask developers for help in writing scrapers).

During some training in open data I was doing recently, I ended up explaining (it’s a long story) how to pull a feed from Delicious into a Google Docs spreadsheet. I promised I would put it down online, so: here it is.

In a Google Docs spreadsheet the formula =importfeed will pull information from an RSS feed and put it into that spreadsheet. Titles, links, datestamps and other parts of the feed will each be separated into their own columns.

When combined with Delicious, this can be a useful way to collect together pages that have been bookmarked by a group of people, or any other feed that you want to analyse.

I’ve been meaning to write a post for some time breaking down all the habits and hacks I’ve acquired over the years – so this month’s Carnival of Journalism question on ‘Hacking your journalism workflow’ gave me the perfect nudge.

Picking those habits apart is akin to an act of archaeology. What might on the surface look very complicated is simply the accumulation of small acts over several years. Those acts range from the habits themselves to creating simple shortcuts and automated systems, and learning from experience. So that’s how I’ve broken it down:

1. Shortcuts

Shortcuts are such a basic part of my way of working that it’s easy to forget they’re there: bookmarks in the browser bar, for example. Or using the Chrome browser because its address bar also acts as a search bar for previous pages.

I realise I use Twitter lists as a shortcut of sorts – to zoom in on particular groups of people I’m interested in at a particular time, such as experts in a particular area, or a group of people I’m working with. Likewise, I use folders in Google Reader to periodically check on a particular field – such as data journalism – or group – such as UK journalists. Continue reading →